(9/1)...streaming

Happy September, dear friend. I do love September. Like March, September is a transition month. We go in on one side during summer and come out the other in autumn. We go in hot, (over 90 degrees today!) and come out (hopefully) cool. We pick apples, sweep acorns, watch college and high school football, and enjoy the beginning of autumn and winter cooking. We have glorious blue skies and strong warm breezes. It's a glorious month.

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Faith and I started school this week. I really don't intend to "rub it in" if you have a whole houseful of children to school, because a whole houseful of children is really a beautiful thing in so many ways. But homeschooling one, sweet-tempered, darling child is just. so. wonderful. I never knew that homeschooling could be so enjoyable. Not that it was not ever enjoyable before, but when there are children squabbling with each other and tugging you (by the heart, if not physically) this way and that, it just wears you down after a while. If you are homeschooling a houseful, I hope to give you an image of your homeschool farther down the road. Faith and I have several more years together (she's only in fourth grade now) and I hope that they can all be as enjoyable as this week. I did not experience one typical "first-day" moment on Monday. She was happy. I was happy. It was good.

I hope to write a short post on what we are doing in school this year, because it is the most I have ever branched out from a standard curriculum since we started this homeschooling journey nine years ago.

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Noah has had quite an adjustment to school, in some good ways and some bad. I write this because I know that many homeschoolers eventually send a child off to school, for many reasons, and they often wonder how it will work out.

Noah left his very first to-be-handed-in assignment at home on Friday. That's a casualty of being homeschooled your entire life -- you never have to pack up and take anything with you. If mom grades an assignment, she does it at home.

Fortunately we got it to him and he received and A-. Yeah for Noah! Homework has been the hardest adjustment. Rarely at home did he have homework and usually it was because he fooled around and didn't get something done and I wanted him to learn a lesson. It's really hard to go to school from 8 to 3 and come home and do three to four hours of homework, especially if you have never done homework on a regular basis. In addition to teaching him to take notes last year I should have more frequently given him after-school work. Live and learn.

He is making a lot of friends, however, and I think, overall, he is enjoying himself. It's very funny that this enormously shy boy (he used to hide behind the furniture when we had company) is actually very popular at school. It turns out he's a bit of a ham and enjoys his comrades' attention.

He is taking band this year, which is an elective class, not an extra-curricular at St. Charles. A condition of buying drums for him last Christmas was taking band at school. So he has been taking private lessons since January, and now has a lesson every day for an hour in eighth period. He was very excited to share that he will be doing the drumroll at the beginning of the Star Spangled Banner at this Friday's football game (it's not a marching band but a pep band). He'll also be playing Eye of the Tiger -- big stuff. There are several percussionists in the band so they take turns, but I think Noah got some great parts. He told me that he can letter in band if he takes it for two years, and I think he will. We're starting to talk about T.B.D.B.I.T. L. a little bit. That's really big! :-D

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Joshua's echo and stress test were normal. That's good. Now the doctor wants him to wear a 48-hour monitor to see if they can figure out what his heart is doing when he feels whatever he is feeling. They want him to take the medication that he takes for ADD while he is on the monitor because even though he doesn't normally take it during the summer, and has not taken it when he has experienced the fluttering, it sometimes exacerbates heart rhythm issues and I think they might see more of what he is experiencing. In many ways it is like caffeine, which I suspect is what caused the problems to begin with. Just a hunch. Let's hope.

Thanks so much for your prayers. We are going to get the monitor next Tuesday and he will wear it until Thursday.

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The basement redo is almost finished.  Yesterday I put down all the carpet tiles (except for the ones that needed to be cut and Doug did those.) The room is about 15 x 25. That's a lot of carpet tiles. My butt is very sore today -- either the sitting on the hard floor or the up and down. Probably the up and down. The floor looks nice. We decided (I decided) to use dark brown and dark gray tiles and checkerboard them. The only problem is we used every single full tile and now have no spares. The whole point to using the tiles was so that if one gets ruined (stained) we can replace it. I now would have to buy two full boxes (because we -- I -- used two colors) to have spares. That will run us $100. I know we're going to need spares and will be really glad to have them, but $100? Sigh.

I promise to have pictures as soon as we get the sofa moved down there and the other furniture back in place -- hopefully next week.


That's all folks...